Archive for January 19th, 2011

Ok, so in the spirit of being totally honest, there are a couple of places in our house that haven’t been shown on the blog, and one of those is the laundry room. We have big plans for this space one day (hopefully soon), but it’s dependent on getting a tankless water heater so that we can unstack the washer and dryer. Our current water heater is new-ish and works-ish despite some rust, so it’s not exactly on the front burner. Regardless of when it gets done, I have fun dreaming up what I want the space to look like when it’s finished, and I’ve been partially inspired by the design board Katie Bower created for their laundry room.

Katie’s design board

Our design board

The Plan:

We already have a new Whirlpool washer, dryer & laundry tower and we have a paint color in mind, so this plan is branching out from there. The links in this post are just for reference, as we will be doing some serious bargain hunting when we get closer to actually making this plan a reality.

Sink – Ideally we’d love a farmhouse sink with a drainboard or two, but our laundry room is… petite, so this America Standard sink might be a better choice, even though it’s certainly not exactly inexpensive.

Faucet – My expensive taste carries over into faucets with this American Standard wall mounted option.

Glass canisters – We already have one of these in the guest bathroom for bath salts, and I love it. In the laundry room they’d be filled with clothes pins and things like that.

Hamper – We currently have a plastic hamper we’ve had for years in the laundry room, but we’d would love to have something nicer looking (the image shown is from Target).

Floor – Currently the floor is sporting some old vinyl, but I love the look of this Pergo Boathouse Pine.

Rug – We’ve heard a lot of good things about FLOR tiles, and at $14.99 a square these Ups&Downs White would be awesome since they could be replaced when they inevitably wind up with bleach spots.

scan from Better Homes & Gardens, Feb ’09 left and Oct ’08 right

Not Pictured in Design Board:

Pedestal – As I mentioned above, in order to unstack our washer and dryer we need a tankless water heater. One thing I didn’t mention is that we also need to build a small pedestal for the washer, dryer and laundry tower to go on. The width of the room is juuust right for them all, but there is a small lip of concrete that we need to raise them up over in order to have them all side by side. It will be nice to DIY this since we don’t need the extra storage offered with the Whirlpool pedestals, and aren’t sure we want the extra 13″ of height they offer.

Counter top – The need for a pedestal actually works out well because we’d like to top the whole thing off with a work surface (similar to the one above left) and the pedestal will add extra height to our 36″ washer &dryer making the counter more comfortable for chores like folding laundry.

Window – Our laundry room doesn’t have a window at the moment, but I’d love to add one and place the sink (which it also doesn’t have yet, though there is a water spigot on the exterior of the same wall) below it. Adding a Grundtal shelf like the one above right would be nice for extra storage and could also function as a drying rack.

Curtains – One day in the hopefully-not-too-distant future we’d like to install an outdoor shower in the backyard, but the window we want for the laundry room would look directly at that, and while the shower would have some sort of gate or curtain, curtains on the window would be good anyhow and could hang from the Grundtal shelf like pictured above.